Quotes (11)

Connie Rubirosa: Tory keeps dusting something off his jacket and in the courtroom I thought he was wearing makeup, like my sister used to wear after a rough night with her abusive boyfriend.
Jack McCoy: How thoroughly did we look into the Quinlann family?
Connie Rubirosa: Not that thoroughly, they weren't suspects.

Connie Rubirosa: What if Tory was a well-adjusted kid from a good family?
Jack McCoy: Not our facts. (pauses) I hope we never have to try that case.

Dr. Elizabeth Olivet: Tory is not an automaton who was programmed to do Roger Kraslow's bidding. He had free will, and he certainly knew right from wrong.

Notes (1)

Special billing was given to Carolyn McCormick (with) and Liam Aiken (and)in this episode.

Trivia (1)

Connie Rubirosa describes her sister having a physically abusive boyfriend; having a family member in an abusive relationship is something she has in common with Jack McCoy, whose father physically abused his mother.

Allusions (2)

Nina Cassady: (of quiet neighborhoods)Blue Velvet -- white picket fences, with a severed ear on the lawn.The opening sequence of the film Blue Velvet is just like Detective Cassady describes. After observing a normal suburb, the camera pans down to show us a human ear hidden in the grass. After the main character finds it, he's drawn into a seedy underworld he never knew existed in his hometown.

This episode appears to be ripped from the headlines of the Michael J. Devlin case. Michael J. Devlin on January 12, 2007, was arrested and charged for the abduction four days earlier of 13-year-old William 'Ben' Ownby. The boy was found on January 12 and, upon this discovery, the police found another missing boy, Shawn Hornbeck, who disappeared on October 6, 2002, at age 11 while riding his bike to a friend's house in Richwoods, Missouri.